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Derhoticisation in Scottish English: Lessons We Can Learn from Sociophonetic Data

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Derhoticisation in Scottish English: Lessons We Can Learn from Sociophonetic Data Stuart-Smith, J., Lawson, E., and Scobbie, J.M. (2014) Derhoticisation in Scottish English: a sociophonetic journey. In: Celata, C. and Calamai, S. (eds.) Advances in Sociophonetics. John Benjamins , Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Copyright © 2013 The Authors http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/87460 Deposited on: 10 April 2014 Enlighten – Research publications by members of the University of Glasgow http://eprints.gla.ac.uk Derhoticisation in Scottish English: A sociophonetic journey Jane Stuart-Smith*, Eleanor Lawson§, and James M. Scobbie§ * English Language/Glasgow University Laboratory of Phonetics, University of Glasgow § CASL Research Centre, Queen Margaret University Edinburgh 1. Introduction1 This paper presents the concrete example of the rewards of a sociophonetic journey by focusing on an area which is particularly rich and informative – fine-grained variation in Scottish English coda /r/. We synthesize the results of some 15 years of research, including our current work in progress, with those of previous studies, and provide a sociophonological account of variation and change in this feature. This forces us to consider carefully the complexrelationships between auditory, acoustic, and articulatory descriptions of (socially structured) speech. Our research also raises questions about speakers’ mental representations of such information. We begin by summarizing observations on coda /r/ in Scottish English across the twentieth century, which reveal a socially-constrained, long-term process of derhoticisation. Then we consider the most recent evidence for derhoticisation from different perspectives in order to learn more about the nature and mechanism of the change. We look at the linguistic and social factors involved (sections 2 and 3); the views from the listener (section 4); the acoustics of derhoticisation (section 5); and insights from a socio-articulatory corpus collected and analysed used Ultrasound Tongue Imaging (section 6). Finally we discuss the implications of our results for representation, by analysts, and for speaker-hearers in this community. 1 Jane Stuart-Smith is grateful to audiences at the Workshop on Sociophonetics (Pisa), and at seminars at the Universities of Oxford, Stanford, and Berkeley, for their feedback on earlier versions of this paper. The research presented here was supported by awards to Jane Stuart-Smith from the Leverhulme Trust (F/179/AX), the AHRC, and the ESRC (R000239757), and to James M. Scobbie and Jane Stuart-Smith, from the ESRC,RES-000-22-2032 and RES-062-23-3246. 1 1.1. Derhoticisation in Scottish English in the twentieth century Scottish English is a range of varieties forming a sociolinguistic continuum between two poles, broad vernacular Scots spoken by working-class speakers at one end, deriving historically from Northern forms of the Anglian dialect of Old English, and Standard Scottish English (SSE), spoken by middle-class speakers at the other, continuing varieties of Southern English English which were adopted by the upper classes from the seventeenth century onwards, and later used increasingly by middle- class speakers (e.g. Stuart-Smith 2003, Durand 2004). In the conurbations of the Central Belt of Scotland stretching between Edinburgh and Glasgow (Figure 1), home to most of the population, many speakers drift up and down the continuum according to formality, context and interlocutor (Aitken 1984). In these urban areas, stratification by social class is still strongly adhered to at both ends of the continuum, with a continual process of social (and geographical) mobility in between (e.g. MacFarlane & Stuart-Smith 2012). INSERT FIGURE 1 HERE Figure 1. The Central Belt of Scotland (see inset) showing the cities of Glasgow on the west, Edinburgh on the East, and Livingston in between (from Lawson et al. 2008). Accents of English which have a phonological specification of consonantal /r/ in coda position (also called ‘postvocalic /r/’) in words such as car, card, are often referred to as ‘rhotic’. Scottish English is the classic rhotic variety of English in the UK (Wells 1982). Although /r/ was once an apical tap [ɾ] and often a trill [r] (Grant 1914, Johnston 1997), at least since the turn of the nineteenth century, derhoticisation in working-class speech, alongside an increasing use of approximant forms of /r/, have led to a sociophonetic continuum in the realization of postvocalic /r/. By derhoticisation, we mean either, diachronically, the gradient phonetic lenition process from trill towards a complete loss of /r/, or, synchronically, productions of /r/ weakly exhibiting few or none of the correlates typically attributed to its rhotic status. We survey the evidence for derhoticisation briefly below. 2 Reports of weak rhoticity in the realization of postvocalic /r/ date back to the early twentieth century, when reports of accent variation are first available. They relate to Scottish English spoken on the West coast, and specifically, as characteristic of the urban speech of the ‘degenerate Glasgow-Irish’, to whom numerous undesirable speech and language habits were attributed, including the infamous glottal stop (Trotter 1901 in Johnston 1997: 511). Polite speakers were noted to use the apical trill [r] or tap [ɾ] (Williams 1909, Grant 1914), or the postalveolar approximant [ɹ] (though, at this point, approximant /r/ was not considered a ‘Scottish sound’ by Grant and Dixon 1921, in Romaine 1978). All these realizations are attested in the very short reading passages recorded by William Dögen for the Berliner Lautarchiv in 1916/17 from young male speakers from Glasgow and surrounding areas (Richmond 2013). By 1938, approximant [ɹ] was a recommended realization for the ‘student of good speech’, as acceptable as [r], and more so if speakers wished to achieve the socially more desirable merger of /ʌ ɪ ɛ/ to /ɜ/ in a prerhotic context, e.g. in the words fur, first and herb (McAllister 1938; Lawson et al. 2013, forthcoming). The earliest indication of derhoticisation in Edinburgh is indirect, from observations made in the Edinburgh Articulation Test (EAT), a standardized study of articulation in children’s speech aged 3.0 to 5.6 carried out in the late 1960s. The authors of the EAT coded vocalized variants along with consonantal /r/, stating: “many Scottish 2½-year-old children used a diphthong in positions where they later developed one of the many forms of [r]. As this diphthong may also be an acceptable adult realisation, it had to be considered correct in this context.” (Anthony et al. 1971: 6, in Scobbie et al. 2007, their emphasis). Note that such diphthongs may also have been picking up recessive upper-middle-class non-rhoticity. A clearer picture of derhoticisation in Edinburgh is made possible thanks to two early sociolinguistic studies, carried out by Romaine (1978) and Johnston (Speitel & Johnston 1983, Johnston 1985). Romaine’s study concentrated on working-class children. Her results showed that boys were less rhotic than the girls, who also used more instances of postalveolar [ɹ], as opposed to tapped or trilled variants. Non-rhoticity was also more 3 common in the wordlists than in spontaneous speech. Romaine interpreted the non- rhoticity in the boys as a vernacular change from below taking place in Scots, “which happens to coincide with a much larger national norm” (i.e. ‘national’ in a UK sense, indicating non-rhoticity in RP, p.155). She saw non-rhoticity as carrying covert prestige, and part of a local system of differentiation from the more socially-desirable postalveolar approximant [ɹ] favoured by the girls, associated with middle-class speakers and prestigious varieties of Highland English (p. 156). Johnston’s study worked with a much larger socially-stratified corpus of adults. He observed two very different kinds of non-rhoticity: that found in older (55-79 year old) Upper Middle-Class women, and that at the opposite end of the social-gender continuum, lower working-class men (18-55 years old), who showed vocalization to a ‘strongly pharyngealized vowel’. Such an outcome is not surprising since articulated /r/ in this speaker group is typically ‘dark’, with secondary pharyngealization. Johnston also found that in coda position, postalveolar [ɹ] was favoured particularly by younger female speakers, and in more formal styles. He suggested that postalveolar [ɹ] was “a recent innovation, probably from middle-class RP, into Edinburgh speech” (p. 27). Johnston interpreted the motivations for both changes in terms of the social dynamics within Scotland. Derhoticisation was identified as showing ‘street-smart’ associations; rhoticity in the middle classes was seen as reflecting constructions of a resurgence of Scottish identity in the Scottish middle-classes, expressed in a ‘home-grown model of Standard Scottish English’ used in preference to, and a reaction against, earlier local Scottish prestige models close to RP. Back on the West Coast, Macafee’s (1983: 32) description of Glaswegian dialect, outlined similar derhoticisation to plain or pharygealised vowels in working-class speakers. Subsequent quantitative analysis of a socially-stratified corpus of Glaswegian collected in 1997 confirmed substantial derhoticisation in working-class speakers, especially adolescents (Stuart-Smith 2003; Stuart-Smith et al. 2007). Derhoticised reflexes fell into two main categories: pharygealised/uvularised vowels, favoured by boys in a specific phonological context (before a consonant, e.g. card); and plain vowels with no audible secondary ‘colouring’, favoured by girls
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